1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, the commercial printing industry receives orders from a third party (customer, client) for printed products (e.g., magazines, newspapers, catalogs, advertisements, photogravures), produces the desired output products for the clients, and delivers the products to the clients to receive payments for the products.
In such a commercial printing industry, a large-scale printing apparatus such as an offset printing machine is mainly used. The printing industry has proceeded with a variety of processes including a job entry, design or layout, comprehensive layout (presentation by printer output), proof reading (layout correction or color correction), proof (proof print), block copy preparation, printing, post-processing work, and shipment. In addition to the commercial printing industry, there is a market called print on demand (POD). The POD market competes with the commercial printing industry as an electrophotographic printing apparatus and an inkjet printing apparatus have enhanced processing speed and image quality thereof.
Such a POD market aims to deal with a large number of copies or a large number of jobs in a short delivery time without using a large-scaled apparatus or system. For example, the POD market has efficiently utilized a digital image forming apparatus such as a digital copying machine and a digital multifunction peripheral.
The POD market provides a digital print using electronic data, and thus the processes of the POD market tend to be managed and controlled by a computer compared to those of the conventional printing industry. In also the POD market, a workflow can be generated which includes a plurality of processes (e.g., pre-print processing process, print processing process, and post-print processing process) to obtain an output result.
Such processes are performed according to the workflow, so that an output result desired by a client is efficiently obtained. However, complications of processing contents to be executed in a post-print processing process may lead to a decrease in the number of operators who are capable of executing the post-print processing process in an appropriate manner. Such a decrease can cause a delay of a print job process. Moreover, there are cases where operators are allocated based on each processing process. In such cases, proper handover of one process to another from one operator to another is very important.
Accordingly, a post-processing physical job ticket for a finishing machine is generally printed so that many operators can execute the post-processing process. The post-processing physical job ticket describes a finishing process to be performed by a post-processing machine (also referred to as a finishing machine) subsequent to a sorting process. Herein, since the operators deal with a number of print jobs, a number of output products are output from an image processing apparatus.
In addition, a final stage of the post-processing process includes an inspection process for checking whether a printed product is produced as desired, for example, by checking printing errors, missing pages, and a finishing state. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-137150 discusses a technique for efficiently performing an inspection process by selecting an inspection operation to be prioritized and executed in response to a characteristic of print information to be input, producing inspection instruction information, and outputting the inspection instruction information.
When an error handling process is performed during a printing process of a product, there is a possibility that the product has a printing error. In such a case, therefore, an inspection process needs to be carefully performed on the product. However, when an operator of the printing process and an inspector of the inspection process are different persons, or when an error handling process is performed during mass printing, the operator or the inspector is unlikely to know what type of error handling process has been performed on which product, or what type of influences may be exerted on which product. Consequently, the printing error is unlikely to be found during the inspection.
In addition, there are cases where a printing error is found too late in the inspection process, causing a waste of processes that have been already performed or consumption of extra time for reworking the processes.
According to the above related-art technique, the point to be prioritized during the inspection process is generated based on the print information. However, the related-art technique does not consider a process for handling unforeseen events such as error occurrences during a printing process. Consequently, when an error is made in a product due to the printing error, the error is more unlikely to be found by the inspection process.